Other Views on the Employer Mandate Delay

Ezra Klein:

Delaying ObamaCare’s employer mandate is the right thing to do. Frankly, eliminating it — or at least utterly overhauling it — is probably the right thing to do. But the administration executing a regulatory end-run around Congress is not the right way to do it.

And on the mandate generally:

Ezra Klein:

Delaying ObamaCare’s employer mandate is the right thing to do. Frankly, eliminating it — or at least utterly overhauling it — is probably the right thing to do. But the administration executing a regulatory end-run around Congress is not the right way to do it.

And on the mandate generally:

It’s a bad bit of policy. In fact, when it first emerged during the Senate’s negotiations, I called it “one of the worst ideas in recent memory.”

Aaron Carroll:

The employer penalty was a solution to try and reduce the cost to the government by shifting more of the cost of insurance onto employers. It has good parts and bad parts. Personally, I agree with Ezra that it could have been done better. I also think the individual mandate could have been done better.

Tyler Cowen:

I agree with Ezra Klein…Here is one good quotation from a source: “Politically, it won’t get easier a year from now, it will get harder,” he said. “You’ve given the employer community a sense of confidence that maybe they can kill this. If I were an employer, I would smell blood in the water.”

My view is you don’t serve up a delay and PR disaster like this, on such a sensitive political issue, unless you really wish to derail the entire provision.

Sarah Kliff:

The White House just swapped one political headache for another.

By delaying a requirement that all large employers provide health insurance, the Obama administration heads off the unseemly spectacle of companies vowing to cut jobs or workers’ hours to avoid the costly mandate.

But the late Tuesday action is not a free pass: It contributes to critics’ claims that the White House does not have the ability to launch its biggest legislative accomplishment on schedule.